How Jeremy Corbyn Moved Past the Politics of 2016

The election campaign has suited the Labour leader far more than the Brexit campaign ever did.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN KITWOOD / GETTY

Many people were blamed, last summer, after the citizens of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, but the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been a squishy and tepid opponent of Brexit, was blamed more than most. “Absent from the battle,” Peter Mandelson, once a strategist for Tony Blair, complained of him. Two-thirds of Corbyn’s leadership team resigned after the Brexit vote, and of the two hundred and twelve Labour members in Parliament, a hundred and seventy-two joined a no-confidence vote against the leader. But Corbyn held on, and turned his attention to the party’s grassroots. This spring, he has so adeptly navigated an election campaign that once seemed a likely rout that he stands an outside chance of ending Thursday as the presumptive Prime Minister. On the stump, Corbyn has always been a first-rate yeller, with a nicely calibrated sense of grievance. On Tuesday, he spoke to a big crowd assembled in the Birmingham drizzle, clutching Labour’s red-bound policy manifesto in his left hand, with a late-appearing rainbow providing a background. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Corbyn yelled. “They underestimated us, didn’t they?”

They probably did. The latest polls suggested that the Conservative Party, headed by the Prime Minister, Theresa May, leads by somewhere between one and twelve points; interviews with Labour backbenchers suggested that they still thought victory was very unlikely. But the election campaign has suited Corbyn—sixty-eight years old, white-haired, an avowed socialist—far more than the Brexit campaign ever did. While the Conservatives kept a low profile, the new debates over nativism and isolationism receded, and Corbyn was able to campaign against older enemies: austerity, privatization, and the gap between the rich and poor.

Slowly, the campaign seemed to bend to these themes. After the Conservatives proposed the so-called dementia tax—under whose provisions sick and elderly patients who needed treatment in nursing facilities might be compelled to sell their homes so that the state could recoup the costs of their care—May, Corbyn’s main opponent, suddenly looked vulnerable. Last week, she declined to show up for a debate, leaving the Labour leader to accost her deputy, Amber Rudd. “I would just say this to Amber: If you think this is a country at ease with itself, have you been to a food bank?” Corbyn said. “Have you seen people sleeping around our stations? Have you seen the levels of poverty that exist because of your government’s conscious decisions on benefits?” The image lingered: not the external menace of the immigrant, but the internal decrepitude of the food bank, the homeless huddling around the depot.

Corbyn remains an uncommitted internationalist, but he no longer seems to be a bad politician. For more than a year, the orienting question in the U.K. has been whether the country ought to look outward or inward. Corbyn’s tactic has been to ask different questions—about who has how much. “We’re socialists,” Corbyn’s great ally and would-be Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, told the Guardian recently. “We want to create a socialist society.”

Last month, Corbyn sat for an interview with the preening but effective TV journalist Jeremy Paxman, during which the host reiterated three-decades worth of tabloid outrage at the excesses of the left. Hadn’t McDonnell once been photographed holding a letter that called for the abolition of M.I.5, the U.K.’s equivalent of the F.B.I.? Hadn't Corbyn called the terrorist group Hamas “friends”? Hadn’t he said that the Falklands War was a Tory plot? Didn't he want to get rid of the Queen?

Corbyn, wearing a red tie, sat opposite Paxman and blinked. “And you know what, I had a very nice chat with the Queen,” he said, smiling. “I'm fighting this election, Jeremy, on something very important, that is the levels of poverty in our society.” He added, “I don’t want to live in a country of food banks.”

The political madness of 2016 was so deep and destabilizing that it left liberals on both sides of the Atlantic wishing for a do-over, a way to refight the battles that they lost last year. In the U.S., this is part of the reason that the special elections in Georgia and Montana, and the investigations into Russia’s election meddling, have been especially tense and urgent. But elections create new conditions. There are no do-overs—things change too quickly.

On Wednesday night, Corbyn gave the final speech of his campaign, in the stunning Union Chapel, in Islington, his own constituency. Near the end, he took out his reading glasses and gave a dramatic performance of a few melodramatic lines from Shelley. “Rise, like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number! / Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you: / ye are many—they are few!” Corbyn was standing in front of a red background emblazoned with Labour’s slogan: “For the many, not the few.” He said that he and his audience had stood together in places like this for countless protest meetings over the decades—“protect this, defend that, support this person.” “Tonight is different,” Corbyn said. “We’re not defending. We’re not defending. We don’t need to. We are asserting. Asserting our view that a society that cares for all is better than a society that only cares for the few.” Monday morning, the Blackpool Gazette ran an advertisement from the Conservatives that covered half its front page. The other half was a news story: “Poverty-hit families are forced to rely on food bank handouts.” The election was being argued on Corbyn’s terms. That isn’t the same as winning, but it is something.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.